The present invention relates to the field of digital photography.
In the past years, digital cameras have become widely spread among unprofessional users, mainly due to cellular phone distribution. To assist amateur users produce higher quality images from their cameras, camera application developers introduced many automatic features such as auto-focus, auto-exposure, auto white-balance, auto-flash mode, face detection and more.
Image composition plays a key role in the quality assessment of photographs and images. It is a common belief that the importance of good photo composition could not be overestimated. This fact is long known to professional photographers and taught in most photography courses and textbooks.
The art of composition deals with the arrangement of objects and settings in images and photographs. It is commonly practiced by most professional photographers and studied in art and photography schools as one of the most fundamental pillars of photography. It includes some basic principles and a few dozen composition rules, which may be applied in different scenarios. Some known composition rules are the rule of thirds, the rule of diagonals, the rule of space, the golden ratio rule, the rule of secondary diagonals, the central composition rule and the symmetric composition rule. A brief of the principles of these exemplary rules are disclosed herein below.
According to the rule of thirds, all vertical or horizontal prominent lines, or approximate lines (i.e., lines having curves but which may be perceived by humans as straight), in an image should be aligned with the top or bottom third lines of the frame of the image (for horizontals), or the left or right third lines of the frame (for verticals). Main objects or interesting objects in the image should be positioned on one of the image's power points, which are the four intersection points of the horizontal and vertical third-lines. The golden ratio rule resembles the rule of thirds. The main difference is that, instead of dividing the image into thirds, it is divided using the golden ratio (1:1.618).
According to the rule of diagonals, a prominent line, or an approximate line, in an image should be aligned with one of the image's two main diagonals or one of the four secondary diagonals (45° lines originating from the four corners). According to the rule of secondary diagonals, four secondary diagonals may be defined in an image. Like the diagonals rule, this rule suggests that placing prominent lines in the image over these four lines may produce a more aesthetic image.
According to the rule of space, a space (background area) should be kept in front of objects which have a certain direction of movement (such as cars, bicycle or a dog) or in front of people looking or moving in some direction.
According to the centered composition rule, if an object is occupying a relatively large portion of the image or if the image does not include other salient details, then the object center of mass should be placed in the center or the image or slightly under the center of the image.
According to the symmetric composition rule, if an image holds a strong linear symmetry, the symmetry axis should be placed such that it may cross the image center.
The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations related therewith are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon a reading of the specification and a study of the figures.